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Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf

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Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf by Timur Kuran* Draft in progress: 3 February 2013 Abstract. The waqf is the closest thing under Islamic law to an autonomous private organization. Hence, in the pre-modern Middle East it served as a key determinant of civil society, political participation, and trust in institutions, among other indicators and components of democratization. This paper argues that for a millennium the waqf delayed and limited democratization in the region through several mutually supportive mechanisms. Its activities were more or less set by its founder, which limited its capacity to reallocate resources to meet political challenges. It was designed to provide a service on its own, which blocked its participation in lasting political coalitions. Its beneficiaries had no say in selecting the officers, whom they could not evaluate. Circumventing waqf rules required the permission of a court, which created incentives for corruption. Finally, the process of appointing successive officials was not merit-based; it promoted and legitimized nepotism. The upshot is that, for all the resources it controlled, the waqf contributed minimally to building civil society. As a core element of Islam’s classical institutional complex, it helped to perpetuate authoritarian rule by keeping the state unmonitored and largely unrestrained. Keywords: Middle East, Ottoman Empire, Arab world, waqf, democracy, autocracy, civil society, collective action, corporation, corruption, nepotism, trust, institutional change, Islamic law, sharia JEL codes: H11, N25, P51, O53, Z12 * Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies, Duke University ([email protected]) Acknowledgment. In the course of writing this article, I benefited from discussions with David Patel and Adam Sabra. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (version of 3 February 2013) 1 1. Introduction Even after the Arab uprisings of 2011, the Middle East1 remains the world’s least democratized region. Its only predominantly Muslim country that qualifies as a full electoral democracy is Turkey, where as late as 1997 the military forced an elected government to resign.2 Several other region-wide patterns point to weak political performance. Trust in strangers, or generalized trust, is strikingly low by the standards of established democracies.3 Likewise, trust in institutions is very limited.4 Corruption is common as perceived by both local residents and foreigners doing business in the region; so is nepotism, the tendency to favor relatives.5 Insofar as they exist, institutional checks and balances are unreliable, which is why secularists and Islamists, and also Shiis and Sunnis, are loathe to being governed by parties under the other’s control. The huge literatures that explore these patterns leave much to be desired even collectively. As numerous surveys have documented, some of the proposed explanations fail to generalize to the whole region. Take the argument that oil revenues allow rentier states to buy off their critics. It leaves unexplained the persistence of autocratic rule in oil-importing Middle Eastern states. Various other popular arguments are inconsistent with evidence from outside the Middle East. Consider the treatment of the Middle East’s low political performance as a legacy of colonialism. It begs the question of why many former colonies outside the region, including India and Brazil, have better political records.6 Usually they focus on proximate factors that are likely to have resulted from long-term social processes rather than some aspect of contemporary governance. With a few exceptions that will be taken up later, writings that aim to explain the Middle East’s chronically poor political performance leave unexplored how the region’s institutional heritage may have constrained political possibilities, facilitated certain outcomes, and hindered reforms. Colonial and post-colonial political institutions were superimposed on a deeply rooted institutional complex that was unsuited to democracy, the rule of law, and basic human rights, as these terms are generally understood. The purpose of this article is to show how one particular pre-modern institution, which played an important economic role throughout the region for a millennium, generated political pre-conditions that account for the slow pace of democratization. This institution is the waqf, which is called habous in parts of North Africa. Known also as a pious foundation, the waqf is a form of trust established and maintained under Islamic law. Within the Islamic legal system, it is the closest thing to an autonomous private organization. As such, it might have given rise to a vibrant civil society capable of constraining rulers and majorities. It might have promoted political participation, trust in institutions, and political accountability, among other indicators and components of democratization. 1 For the purposes of this article, the “Middle East” consists of the 22 members of the Arab League plus Iran and Turkey. 2 On a standardized 0-10 scale (10 best), the population-weighted Freedom House civil liberties score of the Middle East is 4.7, as against 8.6 for the OECD; and the rule of law index of the World Bank is 3.7 for the Middle East, as against 8.0 for the OECD. In both calculations, Turkey is included in the Middle East and excluded from the OECD, of which it is a member. 3 Evidence in Sect. 11 below. 4 Bohnet, Herrmann, and Zeckhauser 2010. 5 According to the 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International (http://www.transparency.org), the population-weighted average government cleanliness score of the Middle East is 3.0 on a 0-10 scale, as against 6.6 for the OECD, the club of advanced industrial democracies (the latter figure excludes Turkey). 6 Diamond 2010 offers a critical survey of the most influential explanations. Ross 2001 provides evidence that oil wealth hinders democratization. Ismael and Ismael 1997 focus on the deleterious effects of colonialism. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (version of 3 February 2013) 2 Civil society refers to the “arena, outside the family, the state, and the market where people associate to advance common interests.”7 Even though many towering thinkers have viewed as a vital component of democratic life, it has proven notoriously difficult to quantify. As a case in point, observers characterizing Middle Eastern civil society as weak have had a hard time establishing this claim independently of its purported outcome, persistent authoritarian rule. However, it is relatively easier to measure certain elements of civil society, including involvement in politics and collective action. Moreover, through theoretical and empirical work, it is possible to identify sources of the less easily measurable characteristics of civil society, such as nepotism and trust in institutions. In exploring the long run political effects of the waqf, it thus makes sense to ask not how it affected civil society per se but, rather, how it may have shaped factors that contributed to civil society. There is an analytical justification for this strategy. Today’s democratic societies followed multiple paths to attain their present political characteristics. Beginning their transformations at different times, they also endured different social cleavages. Their features that we associate with democracyhuman rights, autonomous legislatures and judiciaries, universal suffragedid not develop in lockstep. What European political histories have in common is that they all produced checks and balances of some sort, and they all ultimately strengthened civil society. A fine-grained identification of the waqf’s political functions has two other advantages. It can suggest where a Middle Eastern democratization process might have started. And it can provide insights into what political reforms are likely to run into particularly tough resistance in the present. In what follows I argue that the waqf delayed and limited democratization through several mutually supportive mechanisms. First of all, by design its use of resources was more or less set by its founder, which limited its capacity to reallocate resources to meet political challenges. Second, it was designed to provide a service on its own, which kept it from forming durable political coalitions. Third, in providing a huge variety of heavily subsidized services, it habituated people to receive subsidized public goods; it also discouraged private initiative. Fourth, its beneficiaries had no say in selecting the waqf’s officers, and they played only a very limited role in evaluating their performance. Fifth, circumventing its rules required the permission of a court, which fueled corruption. Finally, the process of appointing successive officials was not merit-based; it promoted and legitimized nepotism. The upshot is that, for all the resources it controlled, the waqf remained a minor player in Middle Eastern politics. It thus contributed to keeping the Middle Eastern peoples politically docile, ignorant, and quiescent. As a key component of the institutional complex that kept the state unmonitored and unchecked by civil society, it set stage for the authoritarian regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unrestrained power usually breeds bad governance. So a consequence of the
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